The Author’s Creativity Matrix

This uses elements of matching and mis-matching as well as big picture and detail to produce lots of ideas and content to bring out a full range of creative flexibility you may not have thought you had. What you do with the resulting content is up to you but it’s likely that inspiration for the following elements of your book can all be covered…

• The big idea, benefits or promise
• A title and subtitle
• The main chapter headings
• Your target audience
• Words for the blurb

There are three main ways we sort data in our minds. They are:

1. Chunking Up (where you’ll get all the benefits and reasons why)
2. Chunking Down (where you’ll get all the detail)
3. Chunking Laterally (where you’ll often find the weirdest stuff and metaphors)

This is useful to know because, what most people describe as creativity is really a form of chunking up and chunking laterally – and when you’re not feeling creative it’s almost always because the details are bogging you down.
So here’s what you’re going to do…

1. Get a big sheet of paper
2. Write a theme, topic, audience, main idea or your subject in the centre (draw it as a picture too if you like) – I’ll choose “Being An Author”
3. Draw the lines as shown below
4. Use the questions below to help you chunk in all the directions (up, down, lateral) and negatively (left) and positively (right) from your main theme

Here’s an example of a completed Creativity Matrix…

Now, if you’re more analytical and prefer to work to a proven formula then here are some other useful tools to spark your imagination to come up with potentially profitable and definitely brilliant book ideas…

Word Association

Choose an overriding theme (you could base this on your prospective target market or your area of expertise) – sum it up in a simple word/phrase and then have a massive brain dump of any words, phrases or ideas that come to mind. This is often better if you have two or more people to bounce ideas off…

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Some people tend to favour one hemisphere over the other (if you’re left handed it’s usually – though not always – your right side) and vice versa but the real key to creativity is to get both of your so-called “logical left” and so-called “intuitive right” sides firing on all cylinders – and working in unison. This is when real magic can happen.

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